Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I have been skeptical of Swift ever since I heard the original goal was the one language to rule them all from Assembly to Javascript. When something is too good to be true it probably is. But I have also given Apple plenty of benefits of doubt.

It seems Swift 6.2 is still unfinished and is acting more like Java. Eternal evolution of language. While it is popular among tech and HN crowds to have new language and framework to play around and work. It brings particular little if not negative user experience in terms of final products. I often wonder if Apple could just have some light touches of improvement on Objective-C in the past 10 - 12 years and instead focuses on actual OS and Apps quality.

It is this lack of focus that has been with Apple since Steve Jobs left.

View on HN

> It seems Swift 6.2 is still unfinished and is acting more like Java. Eternal evolution of language. While it is popular among tech and HN crowds to have new language and framework to play around and work

You can have both. Rust feels "mature" and "finished" if you stick to the stable featureset, but it's still bringing compelling new features over time in spite of that. But this can only be achieved by carefully managing complexity and not letting it get out-of-hand with lots of ad-hoc special cases and tweaks.

Objective-C being stuck in the 1990s forever was not necessarily a good thing.

Stuck in what way? It would have been easy for Apple to make an "Objective-C without the C", where it's still using message passing and the Foundation libraries, but without header files, raw pointers, and all the @messy @syntax. Add little goodies like auto-stringification of enums and so on. I think that kind of superficial cleanup would have been enough to modernize the language. They could have spent the rest of all the time that Swift has consumed on better dev tooling.

I mean, "Objective C without the C" is just Smalltalk. It exists already. But that doesn't help you if you want any amount of backwards compatibility with the existing ObjC ecosystem. So you're kinda forced to go with the low-level approach.

What would stop Apple's hypothetical "Objective-C without the C" from talking to existing Objective-C code? After all, Swift can use UIKit just fine. Even mixing C++ and ObjC is reasonably easy.

In a sense, MacRuby was trying something similar, but the dependency on a GC doomed it.

Umm...Java is extremely conservative in adding new features. Not really sure you can compare to Swift that throws 10x the features in with every major release.

Also, if it hadn’t been (slowly) improving all this time then I would have defenestrated my work laptop, myself, or both long ago.

I’m trying to imagine using it without the stream API just shuts my entire brain down. Records arrived pretty recently and are already essential for me.

You will always have to pay me to program Java, but you’d have to pay me 5x my current salary to do it in Java 8 or earlier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com